Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xix, 261 pp. US$99.99, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-16772-8.
It is a sign of how much the field of social sciences has changed that a new book interrogating the linkages and relationships between religion and nationalism sits in a crowded field. A couple of decades ago, scholars like Peter van der Veer and Mark Jeurgensmeyer had the religious part of the field to themselves, even as historians and other area studies scholars shook their heads, wondering at this blind spot in international relations scholarship. Even more recently it was still fashionable to look forward to the death of nations and nationalism at the hands of regionalism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism.
That was then. Now contributions such as this one by Joseph Chinyong Liow are accepted as mainstream. They are not yet quite so commonplace that authors can overlook providing an apologia for talking about the religious element. They also feel obliged to provide a history of the social sciences’ rejection and belated acceptance of religion as a legitimate field of enquiry, but the topic is mainstream nonetheless. Liow’s book opens with just such an apologia and history, along with an exposition of the conceptual framework of his study. Its introduction of the key concepts used in the book—religion and religious nationalism, the state, nation and nationalism, legitimacy, colonialism, the narrative—is useful, but I found his account of the marginalization and the rehabilitation of religion in Western elite thinking thin and contestable, and I wonder if it really added any value.
Liow takes a solidly constructivist approach to his subject matter. Eschewing both the extremes of primordialist and instrumentalist approaches, he studies the contingent narratives that have formed local religious identities in four Southeast Asian countries and identifies how they have been imbued with political significance that in turn has placed them in a relationship with the local national identity. This analysis applies to both dominant religious/national identities and to subordinate and/or contested ones. Hence, in the case of Indonesia, for instance, he has sections on Christianity and marginalized Muslims like the Ahmadhiyah sect and the Shi’a community, as well as on the dominant Sunni Muslim community.
The substance of the book is found in the four chapters that present Southeast Asian national case studies: a chapter each on the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, in that order. In the case of the first two—chapter 2 on Catholic Philippines and chapter 3 on Buddhist Thailand—the focus is not so much on the country as a whole but on the rebellious southern provinces where Islamic identity plays a role in secessionist/rebellious disputes. This focus is explicitly recognized in the chapter headings. These two chapters are clearly the highlight of the book. In contrast with the chapters on Malaysia and Indonesia, the footnotes in chapters 2 and 3 are replete with evidence of valuable fieldwork, most notably interviews with elites in both the respective national capitals and in the sites of contestation: Mindanao and the old kingdom of Patani (now divided into the three Thai provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat).
In each case Liow has painstakingly tracked and problematized the development of the national and local ethnic identities, seeking to place the religious element in the broader context of nationalist discourses. (In this review, I follow Liow’s lead by treating both the dominant, state-linked national identity and the separatist/rebellious local ethnic identities as “nationalist” identities of equal standing, at least for the purposes of analysis.) The study of the Moro nation (Bangsamoro) in Mindanao is particularly robust, and it provides the reference point for the next chapter’s study of Patani identity (Anak Patani or Patani Darussalam), to the point where chapter 3 is replete with comparative references to chapter 2.
The “problem” peoples in each case are Muslims, but in neither case is Islam the point of the local resistance. Liow makes this crystal clear. Even in the case of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which split from the secular Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) explicitly to pursue an Islamic agenda, the author presents a convincing case that the end game is national, not religious.
I may be slightly overstating Liow’s case, but it seems to me that the underlying argument permeating this book can be expressed thus: that religious nationalism necessarily embraces tensions between the religious and the national elements, but ultimately the religious always serves the national and is subsumed into the national, rather than vice versa. The broader backdrop for this argument is Liow’s contention that religion and nationalism are the two most powerful and enduring forms of politicized identity; with the demise of ideology as a transnational force, this strikes me as a reasonable proposition.
Chapters 4 and 5 are competent and valuable histories of religious-cum-national identities in Malaysia and Indonesia, respectively, and are useful additions to the literature, but they are fairly conventional in their approaches and modest in their ambition compared to the chapters on the Philippines and Thailand.
Michael D. Barr
Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia
pp. 183-185